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WILLIAM SIDNEY PORTER 



0. HENRY 

A MEMORIAL ESSAY 

BY 

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON 



\^ \4- 






In Exchang* 
Duke Uuiveralty 

JUL 1 2 ia33 



O. HENRY 

A MEMORIAL ESSAY 



The New North State, which has but recently sent a 
great pubHsher and man of letters as ambassador to the 
Court of St. James, a scholar and man of letters as aca- 
demic ambassador to the German people, mourns the loss 
of America's greatest short-story writer of our day, 
familiarly and affectionately remembered throughout the 
length and breadth of the land under the pseudonym 
of "O. Henry." It is this same North Carolina of the 
new era in literary culture which has given to America 
the memorable trio of poets: John Henry Boner, whose 
verse won the unstinted praise of great poets; John 
Charles McNeill, the "Scotchman," enshrined in the hearts 
of thousands and now memorialized in deathless bronze ; 
and Henry Jerome Stockard, master in the high and deli- 
cate art of the sonnet. It is only fitting that the people of 
this New North State should express in enduring form the 
perfect tribute to the native genius who evoked the laugh- 
ter of a nation and touched the heart of a world. 

I. 

No one locality, with local or provincial pride, is en- 
titled to boast that from its soil and out of its life was 
the artist, "O. Henry," created and moulded. In an 
unique sense, his stories are a part of all that he had seen, 
of all whom he had known, of all the strange and familiar 



[3] 



places that he had visited in his nomadic wanderings. 
North CaroHna has the honor of being the State of his 
birth and his last resting place. Greensboro, his birth 
place, cherishes the memory of this son of Guilford, born 
on September the eleventh, eighteen hundred and sixty- 
two. His father, Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physi- 
cian of skill and distinction ; his mother, Mary Jane Vir- 
ginia Swaim, was a devotee of literature, and certain of her 
poems appeared in The Greensboro Patriot, at one time edi- 
ted by her father, William Swaim. His grandmother on the 
paternal side was a sister of Governor Jonathan Worth of 
North Carolina, who once said, in a private letter, that so far 
as he had ever heard, there was "not a blemish spot upon 
any of the race as to integrity and honor." Left motherless 
at the age of three, he was reared by his aunt. Miss Eve- 
lena Porter, a woman of powerful individuality and striking 
ability as a teacher. With the exception of a term or two 
at graded school, young Porter received his early education 
under the tutelage of his "Aunt Lena"; and the books 
habitually read to him by his aunt during the recess hour 
went far to develop his taste for reading and love of good 
books. The school children, who gathered at Miss Lena's 
on Friday nights, customarily indulged in a game of story- 
telling, one of the party beginning the story and each in 
turn taking up the thread of the narrative until it was con- 
cluded. It is not fanciful to surmise that, in this innocent 
and amusing game, his talent for narrative and his idio- 
syncrasy for the unexpected denouement first found its 
original impulse.. After the thorough schooling with its 
spur to literary aspiration given him by his aunt, young 
Porter attended the academy ; but in the light of the man's 
own Bohemian nature, we may be sure that he learned 

[4] 



more from his private reading than from his more rigidly 
prescribed studies. "I did more reading between my 
thirteenth and my nineteenth years," he once naively con- 
fessed, " than I have done in all the years since. And my 
taste was much better then. I used to read nothing but 
classics. Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy' and Lane's 
translation of the 'Arabian Nights ' were my favorites." 

After his days of schooling were over, he found employ- 
ment as prescription clerk in the drug store of his uncle, 
Clarke Porter. In the genial, easy-going ways of the South, 
the local celebrities frequented the drug store and furnished 
young Porter with innumerable opportunities for observing 
many rare and unique types of humanity. This "thin, dark- 
haired boy with the observant eye" cherished through- 
out his boyhood days, according to his own confession, "an 
intense desire to be an artist." Though he never became a 
professional cartoonist, young Porter early displayed in his 
pictures of local scenes and celebrities that power of 
minute and pointed characterization so manifest in his 
literary thumb-nail sketches in later years. " One day," 
relates Mr. C. D. Benbow, of Greensboro, " a farmer walked 
into the drug store and asked for Mr. Clarke Porter. Will 
knew the man's face but could not place him. Therefore, 
he told him to sit down and wait until his uncle arrived. The 
fellow took a seat. Will went to the rear of the store and 
made a likeness of him so that he could show it to his uncle. 
On returning, after the caller had gone, Mr. Porter ex- 
amined the picture, and said, ' Why, yes. Will, that man 
sold me some canteloupes and I owe him fifty cents.' That 
was the sort of artist he was." 

"I was bom and raised in No'th Ca'lina and at eigh- 
teen went to Texas and ran wild on the prairies. Wild 

[5] 



yet, but not so wild "—this is 0. Henry's quaint autobiogra- 
phy. When in March, 1881, because it was thought the 
close confinement in the drug store was undermining his 
health, he joined Mr. and Mrs. J. K. Hall on their journey 
to Texas, to visit their sons, Richard and Lee Hall, of Texas- 
ranger fame, many of his friends thought he was making 
a great mistake to turn cowboy, since he had upon him 
all the earmarks of a great cartoonist. The loss of this 
jovial, popular boy was distinctly felt. He had endeared 
himself to many friends in Greensboro and by his clever 
caricatures and dramatic depiction of local characters, 
had contributed greatly to the gaiety of the drug store 
entourage. 

During his early days in Texas, this slight, pallid, anae- 
mic boy, taciturn, facile with his pen, went to live as a 
member of the family of Mr. Richard Hall in La Salle 
County. Through association with the cultured Mrs. Hall 
and access to her fine library, he became an omnivorous 
reader — devouring with relish light and classic fiction, his- 
tory, biography, poetry, science. One of the diversions of 
those days was a minute study of Webster's Dictionary, 
whereby he laid the foundations for his extensive vocabu- 
lary ; and in secret he put on paper stories which Mrs. Hall 
pronounced as interesting as any ever written by Rider Hag- 
gard. I have heard one of his relatives relate that nothing 
delighted Porter so much as to "stump" his friends on 
spelling— his favorite poser being tic douloureux. The 
Spanish language fascinated him ; and within a short time 
he not only became the best speaker of " greaser" Spanish 
on the ranch, but also learned to write and speak pure 
Spanish. Though he always destroyed his stories, he was 
busy with his pencil and sent cartoons back to his friends 

[6] 



in North Carolina. His fame as an illustrator soon reached 
the ears of Mr. John Maddox, who persuaded him to draw 
forty illustrations for a book of reminiscences then writing 
by his friend, Mr. Joe Dixon, a man of wide and varied 
experience. Seized with "stage-fright" Dixon at the last 
moment dropped the manuscript of his book, Carbonate 
Days, into the Colorado River and fled to the wilds of the 
Rockies. Regaining courage, Dixon soon returned to Aus- 
tin and, to placate Mr. Maddox, wrote a burlesque called 
"An Arrested Movement in Southern Literature." This 
skit, which was also illustrated by Porter, described with 
racy humor his brief career as a novelist and the irreparable 
loss to Southern literature in the destruction of the manu- 
script of Carbonate Days. 

Shortly afterwards. Porter went to Austin to live with 
the family of Mr. Joe Harrell ; and during his sojourn was 
bookkeeper in Mr. Harrell's cigar store. In the autumn 
of 1885, he became bookkeeper for Maddox Brothers and 
Anderson, at that time perhaps the leading real estate 
firm in Texas. He is remembered by his friends in Austin 
as an inveterate stor>'-teller ; and the tales that he told 
were quaint, comical, and invariably tipped with an 
unexpected denouement. One of his friends testified 
that he "lived in an atmosphere of adventure that was 
the product of his own imagination." Once, when asked 
why he never read fiction. Porter replied : " It's all tame as 
compared with the romance in my own life." In 1886 and 
for several years thereafter he occupied a position in the 
State Land Office as assistant compiling draughtsman; for a 
time, when that position failed him, he became a clerk in a 
drug store ; and a little later (1890) he became paying and 
receiving teller in the old First National Bank of Austin, 

17] 



During his incumbency at the Land Office, he made a 
successful investment in " stray land " ; and with some 
($250.00) of the money thus earned he purchased of W. C. 
Brann the afterwards notorious magazine, The Iconoclast. 
Brann bought back the inimitable name after only two issues 
of The Iconoclast had appeared under Porter's editorship ; 
and the first number of Porter's rechristened paper, The 
Rolling Stone, was published in Austin on April 28, 1894. 
This paper, which flourished during the years 1894 and 1895 
and attained a circulation of fifteen hundred copies, was a 
comic weekly touching off current events and instinct with 
the spirit of caricature and burlesque. " Dixie " Daniels, 
who for a time assisted him in editing it, has described Por- 
ter as one of the most versatile men he had ever met— a man 
" who could write remarkably clever stuff under all cir- 
cumstances and was a good hand at sketching." The 
satires on local customs and institutions, the burlesques on 
popular novels, notably " Tictocq, the Great French Detec- 
tive " in burlesque of " Monsieur Lecocq," which is ex- 
cruciatingly funny, and the interviews with leading politi- 
cal figures of the day are characteristic of the best work 
of Porter during this period. The wit and cleverness of 
the paper caught the attention and won the praise of such 
national celebrities as Bill Nye and John Kendricks Bangs. 
Political attacks upon the Callahan administration in San 
Antonio, into which Porter allowed himself to be drawn, 
as well as business difficulties in which he became in- 
volved, resulted in the discontinuance of The Rolling Stone 
on April 27, 1895. 

It was during the period of his editorship of The Rolling 
Stone that Porter may be said to have done his first sustain- 
ed work as a writer. In a bam in his back-yard, which he 

[8] 




O. HENKY AS A BABY IN GKKKNSBOKO 



had fitted up as a study, he spent a large part of each day 
reading and writing ; and when this bam was burned in 
1912 there went up in flames the best testimony of Porter's 
literary tastes of that period— a library of more than a 
thousand volumes. 

The marriage of Porter to Miss Athol Estes in 1887— 
though darkened by the fear of the young girl's mother, Mrs. 
P. G. Roach, that she had inherited the tuberculosis from 
which Mr. Estes died— proved to be a happy one. In Octo- 
ber, 1895, Porter and his family moved to Houston, to ac- 
cept a position on the Post offered him by the editor. Col. 
R. M. Johnston. After working for two weeks at a salary 
of fifteen dollars a week, his salary was increased by five 
dollars, and two weeks later it was raised to twenty-five 
dollars a week — a salary which he himself regarded at the 
time as " quite munificent." The first title of his column, 
" Some Postscripts and Pencillings," was soon abbreviated 
to " Some Postscripts," under which title his writings soon 
became widely read and praised. Col. Johnston at this time 
remarked to him : " My boy, within five years you'll be earn- 
ing a hundred dollars a week on a New York newspaper." 

The prosperity came to an abrupt end. Spurred by the 
touch of harsh fortune he went to New Orleans, in July, 
1896. Here he worked at odd jobs and felt the loneliness 
of the man who is "down and out." He now began 
for the first time to turn his talent to account by 
submitting stories to the popular magazines. Seeking 
a nom de guerre, he casually picked up a newspaper, and 
the account of a fashionable ball which it contained fur- 
nished him the name " Henry." For initial, he chose O — 
because it was the easiest of all letters to write ! It was 
inevitable that this provocative and exclamatory should 

[9] 



not long go unchallenged. In answer to the query of an 
inquisitive editor, Porter replied with all the mock solemn- 
ity of a Roman augur that stood for Olivier, the French 
of Oliver. In consequence, some of his earlier stories ac- 
tually appeared with the signature : " Olivier Henry." 

Soon after this, that rara avis, " a friend with a little 
money," inveigled Porter into joining him in a trip to Cen- 
tral America, whither he was bound with the intention of 
going into the fruit business. There was not enough 
money between them to enable them to remain long 
enough in Central America to learn the " whole secret of 
the little banana's development"; the banana plantation 
vanished into thin air, and Porter drifted back to Texas. 
While in Central America, though he saw no revolutions, 
he took an absorbing interest in localities which, in their 
care-free irresponsibility, were reminiscent of that " East 
of Suez" of which Kipling so lovingly speaks. His life 
seemed to be drifting on quite aimlessly, as he " knocked 
around among the consuls and the refugees" trying to 
keep cool, sipping refreshing beverages, and hearing in- 
numerable yams of the opera bouffe existence that is 
comically played out in certain of the South American re- 
publics. In reality he was acquiring an intimate knowl- 
edge of the peculiar atmosphere, exotic, unique, which he 
afterwards reproduced with such a mixture of veracity 
and caricature in his first marked success, Cabbages and 
Kings (1904). 

Upon his return to Austin in February, 1897, Porter 
found his wife seriously ill ; and until her death in July 27, 
1897, he was scarcely a moment from her bedside. Little 
is known of his life in Ohio during the next two or three 
years ; certain it is that he spent nine months after July, 

[10] 



1901, in Pittsburgh at the home of Mr. and Mrs. P. G. 
Roach, the maternal grand parents of his only daughter, 
Margaret, bom in 1889, who was then living with therni. 
It was during this period that his brilliant stories so at- 
tracted the attention of Mr. Oilman Hall, the editor of 
Ainslee's Magazine, that he offered Porter one hundred dol- 
lars apiece for twelve stories and advised him to move to 
New York. In 1902 William Sidney Porter entered New 
York and likewise entered definitively upon a career fa- 
miliar to millions through his masterly short stories. On 
November 27, 1907 he was married to Miss Sarah Lindsay 
Coleman, of Asheville, North Carolina. Only two years of 
true happiness were his portion. William Sidney Porter 
died in New York City on June 5, 1910. He sleeps in the 
heart of the mountains he loved so well. His fame be- 
longs to North Carolina, to America, and to the world. 

II. 

It is probably true that few of that great throng, who 
revelled in the whimsicalities and surprises of O. Henry's 
stories and in their clamorous eagerness for more seemed 
insatiable, realized the deliberate and subtle art of this 
North Carolina master of the short story. Yet those who 
are familiar with his life as well as those who have closely 
studied the mechanics -of his craft, know that he was re. 
lentless in his devotion to his art and mercilessly unspar- 
ing of his own pleasure, recreation, and even health in his 
pursuit of the ultra-refinements of technic. His stories are 
singularly brief, laconic, pointed ; they bristle with the un- 
expected surprises and the daring denouements of the 
brilliantly original mind. O. Henry was an artist who, 
through wide travel and close contact with many phases 

[11] 



of life, was enabled to endow his stories with inexhaustible 
variety in locale and racial type. Yet his touch is light, 
his method photographic; geography never gets in the 
way of human interest. To the late Harry Peyton Steger, 
who purposed writing his biography. Porter once signifi- 
cantly remarked: "People say I know New York well. 
Just change Twenty-third Street in one of my New York 
stories to Main Street, rub out the Flatiron Building and 
put in the Town Hall. Then the story will fit just as truly 
elsewhere. At least I hope this is the case with what 
I write. So long as your story is true to life, the mere 
change of local color will set it in the East, West, South, 
or North. The characters in the 'Arabian Nights ' parade 
up and down Broadway at midday, or Main Street in Dal- 
las, Tex.". In this brief confession rests the eternal prin- 
ciple of universal art. It was the incomparable gift of O. 
Henry to be able to surprise, discover, and image forth the 
pristine humanity of the local incident ; he humanized the 
temporal into the eternal. Life, as mirrored in his fancy, 
was not a question of geography, of costume, of mere 
peculiarities of speech or twists of idiosyncracy. " Life," 
he once comically, yet most veraciously confessed, "is 
made up of sobs, sniffles and smiles— with sniffles predomi- 
nating." 

In his heart, 0. Henry was a pure type of the American 
romanticist of to-day. Of himself he was thinking, I dare 
say, when he wrote the words : " The true adventurer goes 
forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown 
fate." Life held her rich surprises in store for him at every 
turn. Bohemian in his nature, sympathetic always with 
the under-dog, restless and nomadic in his temperament, he 
sought intercourse with the "down and outers" of this 

[12] 



world— to sense the color of their lives, to catch the ro- 
mance of their story. For hours he would chat with some 
derelict of the docks, some drifting waste of humanity — 
who might or might not furnish a concrete story, but 
who would invariably set up such reactions in O. Henry's 
mind that a story would shape itself eventually into being. 
This great celebrant of New York, its poetry and its 
prose, its color, mystery, and romance, knew the vast city 
from end to end, from attic to cellar. " When I first came 
to New York," he once confessed, " I spent a great deal of 
time knocking around the streets. I did things then that 
I wouldn't think of doing now. I used to walk at all hours 
of the day and night along the river fronts, through Hell's 
Kitchen, down the Bowery, dropping into all manner of 
places, and talking with anyone who would hold converse 
with me. I have never met a man but what I could learn 
something from him. He's had some experiences that I 
have not had ; he sees the world from his own viewpoint. 
If you go at it in the right way, the chances are that you 
can extract something of value from him. But whatever 
else you do, don't flash a pencil and a note-book. Either 
he will shut up or he will become a Hall Caine." 

It was in this way and no other that O. Henry learned to 
know his world of "stenographers, musicians, brokers, 
shop girls, space-rate writers, art students, wire tappers 
and other people who lean far over the banister-rail when 
the door-bell rings." How else can we explain the mor- 
dant realism of " The Memento," revealing the scarifying 
disillusionment of the world-worn yet romantic young 
third-rate actress when she discovers that her minister-hero 
is no better than the "average sensual man?" Or the 
pathos of the tribulations of Soapy, the tramp, rampage- 

[13] 



ously trying to get himself arrested, to no purpose ; and yet, 
when the Sabbath bells ring oeace and repentance into his 
heart, feeling upon his shoulder the heavy hand of the 
law, banishing the vagrant to the Island for thirty days ! Or 
the strange, sentimental code of Tildy in her brief debut— 
the unnoticed scrub-waitress, exalted to the seventh heaven 
of romantic bliss when a drunken boarder " insults " her 
with an unpunished caress, and then plunged into the 
depths of woe when he afterwards apologizes? " He ain't 
anything of a gentleman," wails the disconsolate Tildy, 
" or he wouldn't of apologized." 

It has not been sufficiently recognized by the critics that 
O. Henry possessed very distinct gifts as a dramatist. At 
the time of his death, it was frequently stated that "America 
claimed O. Henry as the greatest living short-story writer, 
with the exception of Rudyard Kipling." It is very prob- 
able that, had he lived, he would have seen many of his 
stories dramatized and produced both on the legitimate and 
the comedy stages and in motion pictures. A number of 
his stories since his death have been seen in motion pic- 
tures; and his two plays: Alias Jimmy Valentine, a dram- 
atization of A Retrieved Reformation, and A Double De- 
ceiver, a dramatization of A Double-Dyed Deceiver, have 
been successfully produced in all parts of the United States. 
Alias Jimmy Valentine was one of the greatest successes 
of its type ever put upon the American stage. Porter sold 
the dramatization rights to his short-story for only five 
hundred dollars, to Mr. Paul Armstrong. The dramatist 
is said to have realized fifty thousand dollars from the pro- 
duction, and the producer a much larger sum. 

The greatest contribution to literary technic by Ameri- 
can genius has lain, thus far, in the domain of the short- 

[14] 



story. One need only mention Poe, Hawthorne, Harte, and 
O. Henry. Poe was a denizen of a No-man's Land of the 
imagination, strangely unrelated to the soil from which he 
sprang. Hawthorne was a Puritan of the Puritans, seeing 
life in its ultimate ethical and moral aspects. Harte was 
an artist who played upon a single string. O. Henry was 
racy of the soil, instinct with sentiment, romantic ; versa- 
tile in technic; utterly American; wholly human. It is 
not unreasonable to premise that America, whose great 
writers have virtually originated, created, and perfected 
the art of short-story writing, will make her first signi- 
ficant contribution to great drama in the field of the one- 
act play, the type of dramatic art which has already reach- 
ed such a high degree of excellence in European art. 
Mr. Norman Hackett, the able and delightful actor, who 
has starred in Professor Donald Stuart's dramatization of 
O. Henry's A Double-Dyed Deceiver, in an address delivered 
at Greensboro, on October 18, 1913, paid high tribute to 
O. Henry's genius as a dramatist. In Speaking of O. 
Henry as a man of letters, Mr. Hackett said : " His instinct 
and viewpoint were essentially dramatic, and in his short- 
stories he employed the technic of the dramatist, with its 
directness of approach, elimination of unessential details and 
the convergence of all lines straight to a dramatic conclusion. 
His writings form a rich mine of dramatic material which 
is now being recognized as such and utilized. Why should 
the man have been so sure in his dramatic instinct ? What 
was there in his life that developed this instinct ? It was 
simply that he knew the drama of life itself. From a cos- 
mopolitan experience, complex, bewildering, soul-marking ; 
matured by wide travel, strengthened by actual contact 
with adversity and discouragement, the whims of fickle 

[15] 



fortune as well as the satisfaction of final triumph; his 
spirit was tempered and sweetened through an understand- 
ing and vision of human misery as of human greatness. It 
was just because of his reticence, of a nature naturally re- 
tiring, that he was able to stand on the street comer and 
watch the endless procession of complex life sweep by, see- 
ing and understanding it in all its dramatic richness and 
variety." 

It is this quality of reticence which impressed all who 
knew him, even his most intimate friends— even The One 
Who Knew Him Best. " To meet him for the first time," 
said Mr. Richard Duffy, " you felt his most notable quality 
to be reticence, not a reticence of social timidity, but a re- 
ticence of deliberateness. If you also were observing, you 
would soon understand that his reticence proceeded from 
the fact that civilly yet masterfully he was taking in every 
item of the ' you ' being presented to him to the accom- 
paniment of convention's phrases and ideas, together with 
the 'you' behind this presentation. It was because he 
was able thus to assemble and sift all the multifarious ele- 
ments of a personality with sleight-of-hand swiftness that 
you find him characterizing a person or a neighborhood in 
a sentence or two ; and once I heard him characterize a 
list of editors he knew each in a phrase." In an incident 
which occurred during one of Porter's sojourns in Western 
North Carolina, I can personally vouch for his constitu- 
tional shyness. I was most eagel- to have him make the 
principal address before the State Literary and Historical 
Association of North Carolina in 1908. I knew of his shy- 
ness — but hoped against hope. At my instance, the invita- 
tion of the Association was extended to him through the 
Secretary, by letter. Porter declined, courteously but most 

[16] 



firmly, by wire. He was too shy to face the music, 
the tumult and the shouting. I have realized, through 
long study of the man's art and personality — though 
it was never given me to know him face to face, — that 
his reticence had two distinct manifestions. Will Por- 
ter took great pride in the fact, and it was a fact often re- 
peated by him, that every line he had ever written could 
be read in the family circle. I think nothing could express 
the purity of the man's soul better than that. Surprise has 
often been expressed that none of his stories were as- 
sociated with the scenes of his childhood, or at least that 
the situation was not laid in North Carolina. It is the 
innate reticence of the man — his evasion of intimacy with 
others, his guardianship of the sanctity of personality — 
which explains his avoidance of the autobiographical in his 
stories. His feelings about his birthplace were too tender- 
ly intimate to himself, his sentiment for the scene of his 
greatest happiness in the purple twilight of the great 
mountains too sacred, to be exposed for American daws to 
peck at. Yet once he broke his unalterable rule — in Let Me 
Feel Your Pulse; and who that has been there does not re- 
call the scene near Asheville summoned by the following 
words: "John has a country house seven miles from Pine- 
ville. It is at an altitude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains 
in a state too dignified to be dragged into this controversy. 
. . Amaryllis met and greeted us. . . It was about 
twilight and the mountains came up nobly to Miss Murfree's 
description of them." Lured by stories of a wonderful flow- 
er with mystical curative powers, he and the old doctor 
"hunted the cure-all plant among the mountains and valleys 
of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep heights so 
slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch every 

[17] 



sapling and branch within our reach to keep from falling. 
We waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with 
laurel and ferns; we followed the banks of mountain 
streams for miles, we wound our way like Indians through 
brakes of pine— road side, hill side, river side, mountain side 
we explored in our search for the miraculous plant." At 
last he found it— and his heart is laid bare for a fleeting in- 
stant in the cry : " What rest more remedial than to sit 
with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read 
the wordless Theocritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue 
mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the 
night ? " 

The love of Will Porter for his old home State, his feel- 
ing of an intimate bond with the place of his birth, best 
finds expression in his whimsical and quaint letters " back 
home " from Texas, a few of which have been printed. 
After writing hundreds of short-stories, he at last resolved 
to write a novel into which he intended to put the very 
best of himself with the greatest art and skill at his com- 
mand. It was to be a true story — the actual revelation of 
the life of a man — " nothing but the truth." It was not to 
be a mere autobiography — the hero was a distinct personal- 
ity. But it is in the highest degree significant that the 
scene of the story was to be laid in a "somnolent little South- 
ern town " — the Greensboro — who doubts it ? — of his boy- 
hood days. And who doubts that — under cover of his denial 
that it was to be pure autobiography— he meant to tell his 
own story. Of his "hero" he says, in words which betray 
him : " I'm going to take him through all the main phases of 
life — wild adventure, city, society, something of the ' under 
world,' and among many characteristic planes of the phases. 
I want him to acquire all the sophistication that experience 

[18] 



can give him, and always preserve his individual honest 
human view, and have him tell the truth about every-thing." 
North Carolina is the poorer that death robbed the world 
of this true record of a man — William Sidney Porter. 

In the spring of 1905, the mother of Mi^ Sarah Lindsay 
Coleman on returning to her home at Weaverville, after a vis- 
it to Greensboro, casually remarked to her daughter: "Your 
old friend Will Porter is a writer. He lives in New York 
and writes under the name of O. Henry." The name stirred 
Miss Coleman's memory : " O. Henry ! In my desk lay Mad- 
am Bo-Peep and I loved her. I wrote O. Henry a note. ' If 
you are not W ill Porter don't bother to answer,' I said. He 
bothered to answer." In her letter she had spoken of her 
desire to write — later to find free expression when she won 
a name for herself in " Sarah Lindsay." In answer came 
the words: "Attend — oh, princess of the Bluest Ridge! 
Fate has cheated you out of the life you were made for. 
You have a warm heart, and talent and ambition. Right 
here is the only market for them in this country. If I didn't 
think you had the genius to win the game I'd never advise 
you to try. Go out and talk to the tomato vines and the moon 
about it. They are good counselors." Prophetic were the 
added words : " I don't know that I can tell you what the 
boy developed into except to say— sincerely — into one surely 
no better, unsatisfied, and never forgetting the little girl 
next door." Mrs. Porter herself has recently given us a 
little glimpse into that sequel to a boyhood romance. 
" 'Some day when you are not real busy,' further ran his reply 
' won't you sit down at your desk where you keep those anti- 
quated stories and write to me. I'd be so pleased to hear 
something about what the years have done for you, and 
what you think about when the tree frogs begin to holler 

[19] 



in the evening. ' Thus after many years a boy and girl friend- 
ship was renewed. Last in my list (of favorite stories), 
but first in my heart, is Adventures in Neurasthenia, the 
new title — Let Me Feel Your Pulse — the publishers gave. 
It brings back the little office in Asheville, the pad, empty 
except for the title and the words : ' So I went to a doctor.' " 
The romance of youth came true — and days spent in West- 
ern North Carolina were the happiest days of his life. 

It was eagerness to surpass himself, the straining upward 
toward higher achievements, that brought him low. The 
solitude of the mountains silenced his brain; he fled to 
New York for the stimulus of cosmopolitan struggle. His 
description of New York is significant : " It is a combina- 
tion of Delilah, green Chartreuse, Beethoven, chloral, and 
John L. in his best days." It wooed 0. Henry to its bosom 
"with the subtlety of a siren"— and like the Lorelei swept 
him to destruction. When genius scintillated in his brain 
and invention ran madly from his pen. New York was the 
queen of Manhattan, the siren of the world. When health 
failed him, invention flagged, and illness came, he wonder- 
ingly cried : " I don't know what is wrong with Broadway. 
But it has lost its glitter." Surely this man, this genius, 
"went climbing to his fall." 

New York was a siren with the meretricious glitter of a 
Great White Way. North Carolina was a mother, with the 
solace of the cradle of the great mountains. And even 
when he was most remote in distance from his native 
State — and perhaps uncertain of his return — it was 
to the home land, to North Carolina, that his heart 
unerringly turned. In a letter to me, Mr. Al. J. Jen- 
nings of Oklahoma City, said: "I knew 'Bill' Porter 
perhaps better than any other man on earth, before he 

[20] 



wrote his Cabbages and Kings. We sat under man- 
grove trees in the little town of Gorilla in the heat of the 
sun, looking far out across the billowy sea, trying to fath- 
om what might be doing in the old United States. He 
talked of North Carolina and childhood ; I, of my native 
State, Virginia ; but neither asked the other why he was in 
Central America. Porter was a child of fortune, I was a fugi- 
tive from justice. He was not aware of that fact. He only 
knew me as a man, and I can safely say that to his dying day 
he loved me." One who knew Porter intimately all his 
life recently pointed out that O. Henry, v/hile a Bohemian 
and a cosmopolite in a sense, did not believe that it was 
possible for a man to be a "cosmopolite all through." 
Nothing could better express his own feeling for his native 
place, we are convincingly assured, than his clever story, 
A Cosmopolite in a Cafe. " Just as the hero of that story 
fought a man ' on account of things said about the bum 
sidewalks and water supply of the place he come from,' so 
would 0. Henry, who was an artist with his fists, have 
fought any man who had, in his presence, spoken evil of 
Greensboro— for ' he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the 
place.' " Underneath the banter and jest, how much of the 
true love of the man for his South, for his home, lurk in 
the words of a letter recently published: "Can't get to 
loving New Yorkers. Live all alone in a great big two 
rooms on quiet old Irving Place, three doors from Wash. 
Irving's old home. Kind of lonesome. Was thinking lately 
(since the April moon commenced to shine) how I'd like to 
be down South, where I could happen over to Miss Ethel's 
or Miss Sallie's and sit on the porch— not in a chair — on 
the edge of the porch, and lay my straw hat on the steps 
and lay my head back against the honeysuckle on the post 

[21] 



—and just talk. And Miss Ethel would go in directly (they 
say presently up here) and bring out the guitar. She 
would complain that the E string was broken, but no one 
would believe her ; and pretty soon all of us would be sing- 
ing the ' Swanee River' and ' In the Evening by the Moon- 
light ' and — oh, gol dam it, what's the use of wishing." 

Many are the stories told of O. Henry, of his Bohemian 
taste, his quaint fancy, his innate shyness, his love for the 
play upon words, his tremendous surplus of temperament, 
his skill at repartee. Familiar to all is his remark about 
Mr. Walter H. Page, as editor of The World's Work, that 
his letters of rejection were so admirable that they could be 
discounted at the bank. His rules for story-writing are fa- 
mous : " Rule I of story-writing is to write stories that please 
yourself. There is no Rule II." Facetiously asked what Rule 
II would be, if there were one, he replied : "Sell the story." 
I was told by a member of the party that on one occasion. 
Porter and his wife and some friends were marooned 
at a little wayside station with no fire in the stove in the 
middle of winter, waiting for a belated train. After a long 
wait in dead silence, with much shivering and chattering 
of teeth, Porter cheerfully remarked : " Many are cold, but 
few are frozen." Just after the ceremony, when Mr. Por- 
ter was married to Miss Coleman, there came that ghastly 
pause when no one speaks or knows just what to say. 
Mrs. Coleman was standing close by with a wistful look on 
her face; but Mr. Porter broke the awkward pause by 
grasping his mother-in-law's hand and with an enthusiastic 
shake, saying: "I'm delighted to welcome you into the 
family." The minister at the wedding was very nervous, 
and was trying to chaff Porter into a like nervousness — to 
which Porter bluffly replied : " Oh, you can't fuss me a bit, 

[22] 



I've got a ring in every pocket." Wit and repartee with 
him were a passion— a ruling passion strong even in death. 
" He was looking toward the window ; there was no sign 
yet of dawn. He rolled his head back toward the dim hos- 
pital lamp and whispered— the last words he ever uttered : 
' Turn up the lights : I don't want to go home in the dark.' 
Just before his spirit mingled with the peaceful ocean of un- 
numbered souls, he looked up and gave them one of his 
quick smiles. And on that smile he died." 

After his death was found in a note-book the following 
poem, The Crucible, or After the Battle, which he had 
written : 

Hard ye may be in the tumult, 

Red to your battle hilts ; 
Blow give for blow in the foray, 

Cunningly ride in the tilts ; 

But when the roaring is ended, 

Tenderly, unbeguiled. 
Turn to a woman a woman's 

Heart, and a child's to a child. 

Test of the man, if his worth be 

In accord with the ultimate plan, 
That he be not, to his marring, 

Always and utterly man ; 
That he bring out of the tumult, 

Fitter and undefiled, 
To woman the heart of woman, 

To children the heart of a child. 

Good when the bugles are ranting 

It is to be iron and fire ; 
Good to be oak in the foray, 

Ice at a guilty desire. 
[23] 



But when the battle is over 

(Marvel and wonder the while) 
Give to a woman a woman's 

Heart, and a child's to a child. 

His little poem, Irony, which was written at his daugh- 
ter's request for her school paper, is somehow subtly charac- 
teristic and expressive of the man : — 

I called on Fame : the office boy 
Said : " Please send in your name." 
" Indeed I have none," I replied. 
And so, away I came. 

I called on Wealth : I was required 

To pay an entrance fee ; 
" I have no money," I replied, 

And left immediately. 

I called on Love : it was decreed 

That first I show my heart. 
" She has it," was all I could say : 

And then I did depart. 

III. 

At the time of his death and for a number of years pre- 
ceding, O. Henry was the most popular writer of short 
stories in the United States. He vied with Rudyard Kip- 
ling for the honor and reward of receiving the highest rate 
of remuneration for short stories. His stories have been 
translated into foreign languages, notably into French, 
German and Spanish ; have had wide range in England ; 
have been dramatized and have achieved great popular suc- 
[24] 




L- I'-l - 

u-^ ;v e 



cess, both on the legitimate stage and in motion picture 
plays. During a sojourn in Berlin in 1911, 1 well recall 
that the lecture of Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, his biographer, 
on The American Sfiort Story delivered at the University 
of Berlin attracted exceptional attention and led to the im- 
mediate publication of certain of O. Henr>''s stories in Ger- 
man translation in Berlin periodicals. I recall another 
significant incident in my own experience. Upon one oc- 
casion, I was dining at the Savage Club in London with a 
friend, an English publisher. At the same table were seated 
two other men who were strangers to me. My friend and 
I were talking animatedly of O. Henry, and during a momen- 
tary pause in the conversation, we noticed that the others 
were also talking animatedly of O. Henry. At once we all 
began to talk at the same time about O. Henry. All three 
were publishers, all three Englishmen, all three eager to se- 
cure the copyright on O. Henry's works ! Shortly after- 
wards, one of these three publishers brought out Cabbages 
and Kings in England ; and many of O. Henry's stories have 
since been published in England, notably in the magazine 
edited by the late Robert Barr. In comparing O. 'Henry 
with Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer in the Spectator, after 
according high praise to 0. Henry's individual point of view 
and "remarkable gift of literary expression," pointed out 
that his "close contact with the raw edges of life never dull- 
ed his romantic gaze or extinguished his belief in human- 
ity." O. Henry's A Municipal Report has often been pro- 
nounced, by competent critics, to be the finest short-story 
ever written in the English language. The late Professor H. 
T. Peck said of O.Henry: "He has constructed a panorama 
of the times in which we live. At heart he is an optimist, 
who believes that in every human being there is to be found 

[25] 



something good, however mixed it may be with other 
quahties ; and like a true American he can see and chuckle 
at it all." In speaking before the State Literary and Histori- 
cal Association of North Carolina in 1911, his biographer em- 
ployed these impressive words: "What Helper, of Mocksville, 
did for the economic argument against slavery, O. Henry, of 
Greensboro, did for the four million of New York. The 
one appealed to the head, the other to the heart. But both 
appeals were national and the services of both men should 
be capitalized in our history for future generations." Per- 
haps the most remarkable feature of 0. Henry's career as a 
man of letters is found in the fact that a boy, bom in North 
Carolina, who spent the first forty years of his life in the 
South and the Southwest, should have become the most 
brilliant and adequate interpreter in American literature 
of the atmosphere and the common life of New York City. 
The philosophy of the man and his writings is best ex- 
pressed in his words in outlining the theme of a play, The 
World and the Door, which he was dramatizing from one of 
his own stories at the time of his death : " My purpose is to 
show that in every human heart there is an innate tenden- 
cy towards respectable life, that even those who have fal- 
len to the lowest step of the social ladder would, if they 
could, get back to the higher life. The innate propensity 
of human nature is to choose the good instead of the bad." 
0. Henry was a great Southern genius and a great nation- 
al genius. But greater than all, he was profoundly hu- 
man in his art. It was his nature to care for the lowly rather 
than for the exalted. " I wander abroad at night," he says 
in one of his stories, " seeking idiosyncracies in the masses 
and truth in the heavens above." This male Scheherazade 
of the new Bagdad-on-the-Subway defiantly espoused the 

[26] 



cause of the census-taker, that wiser man in his larger 
estimate of human interest who proclaims that the people 
of New York City really worth noticing are not the Four 
Hundred but the four million. O. Henry is the narrator 
and the celebrant of the life of the great city in the parks 
and open squares, the cheap restaurants and bowery 
haunts, the crowded department stores and the tiny homes 
of the aerial flat-dwellers. The poor and the humble, the 
hobo and the shop-girl, the clerk and the copper, the va- 
grant of the park, the derelict of the bread line, the fiat 
dweller and the commuter— these were the favorite sub- 
jects of his amused and loving inquiry. All possessed a 
vital, an absorbing interest for him because they were real, 
human, true. Everywhere this errant Bohemian found a 
human interest rich in magic and romance. He has drawn 
with artist's hand a powerfully imaginative picture of the 
surprise, the mystery, and the wealth of storied interest in 
the life of the New Manhattan. " In the big city the twin 
Spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking 
worthy wooers. As they roam the streets they slyly peep at 
us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without 
knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a 
face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate por- 
traits ; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony 
and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house ; in- 
stead of at our familiar curb a cab-driver deposits us before 
a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and 
bids us enter ; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down 
to our feet from the high lattices of chance ; we exchange 
glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with 
hurrying strangers in the passing crowds ; a sudden souse 
of rain— and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter 

[27] 



of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System ; 
at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes 
besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysteri- 
ous, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped 
into our fingers." 

This quality of inextinguishable romance, this chivalric 
note — these are the traits of the Southerner, of the North 
Carolinian. It was here in North Carolina that he found 
the sweetheart of his youth— here that he found surcease 
from metropolitan care in the enfolding shelter of the Blue 
Ridge— it is here that he sleeps. As a Southerner, he loved 
the South ; as an artist, he realized her amiable vices, her 
lovable weaknesses. Uncle Bushrod, that dusky guardian 
of the accolade, faithfully holding " Marse Robert " true to 
the romantic ideals of his youth ; the ultimate emancipa- 
tion of " Billy," after years of solitary struggle under the 
consuming blight of an overshadowing parental tradition ; 
the excitement of "Thimble, Thimble," with its convin- 
cing denouement of the final identification of the Northern 
brother by his business practicality, of the Southern brother 
by the integrity of his plighted word ; the social comedy of 
that typical Southern magazine of the old school. The Rose 
of Dixie, which reproduces an article by T. Roosevelt — 
known in Georgia not as Rough Rider, author, or President, 
but only through his relationship to the Bullock family ; the 
tender sentiment mingled with dark irony of A Municipal 
Report; the quaint humor and light touch oi An Adventure 
in Neurasthenia, reminiscent of the Land of the Sky — stories 
such as these testify to 0. Henry's strong and tender feel- 
ing for the South, his admiration for her finer qualities, his 
faculty of kindly raillery at foibles that are passing with 
a passing age. Like another great humorist, Alphonse 

[28] 



Daudet, who amused a world with delicate satire of his 
beloved South, O. Henry let his light raillery play with 
kindly light over the South of his own birth— her manners, 
her customs, and her people. 

North Carolina gives to posterity her great writer of this 
new time, secure in the originality of his genius, the 
uniqueness of his art, the humanity of his spirit. Upon 
the memorial, dedicated to his memory in token of the ad- 
miration, the gratitude, and the love of a people, are in- 
scribed these ineffaceable words of his, profoundly, mutely 
expressive of his own art and humanity : 

" He no longer saw a rabble, 
But his brothers seeking the ideal." 

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON. 
Chapel Hill, N. C, November, 1914. 



[29] 



O. HENRY : IN MEMORIAM. 

(Died June 5, 1910.) 

In the twilight of the city, as I dreamed, as I dreamed. 

Tangled shadows fell fantastic on the ever-pulsing street. 
Little lights began to glimmer through the filmy veil of 
night. 
And I knew that work had ended by the homeward- 
turning feet. 
Then a tide of men and women rolled before me from the 
west, 
Breaking over into houses, into hall and alley swirled ; 
Back from shop and store and work-room to the refuge 
of the home ; 
Through the sluices of the city beat the power of the 
world. 



And I wished I had his vision — he who saw and under- 
stood, 
And he watched the men and women on the stage of 
everyday. 
All the wrangling and the toiling and the bungling of the 
cast, 
While it potters through the eons in the great Creation 
Play. 
How I longed to sense the meaning of the God behind it all. 
Of the spirit as it brightens through the coarsest human 
flesh. 
Of the music, sweetly hidden in the roaring city din, 
Of the single purpose showing in the tangle of the mesh. 



[30] 



Far below me boomed the thunder and the tidal wave beat 
high, 
On its crest I saw the murmurs of the passing comedy ; 
Shopgirls, idlers, peddlers, salesmen, errand boys with lag- 
ging feet. 
Kind and sad and hostile faces in the swelling human sea. 
And in each I felt a story worthy of the master's skill. 
Sensed the presence of the passions that control the hu- 
man breast ; 
Knew an epic lived within them, dumb waiting to be told. 
But a mind that knew the meaning slept in its eternal 
rest. 



What a world he left behind him, what a web of wonder 
tales ! 
Fact and fiction subtly woven on the spinning wheel of 
Truth! 
How he caught the key of living in the noises of the town, 
Major music, minor dirges, rhapsodies of Age and Youth ! 
In the twilight of the city, as I dreamed, as I dreamed. 

Watching that eternal drama in the ever-pulsing street. 
All about me seemed to murmur of the master passed away. 
And his requiem was sounded in the city's fever beat. 
— Elias Lieberman in The New York Times. 



[31] 



THE WORKS OF O. HENRY. 

Cabbages and Kings. N. Y., McGlure, Phillips & Co., 
1904. 

The Four Million. N. Y., McClure, Phillips & Co., 1906. 

The Trimmed Lamp. N. Y., McClure, Phillips & Co., 
1907. 

Heart of the West. N. Y., The McClure Co., 1907. 

The Gentle Grafter. N. Y., The McClure Co., 1908. 

The Voice of the City. N. Y., The McClure Co., 1908. 

Roads of Destiny. N. Y., Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909. 

Options. N. Y., Harper & Bros., 1909. 

Whirligigs. N. Y., Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910. 

Strictly Business. N. Y., Doubleday, Page & Co., 1910. 

Let Me Feel Your Pulse. N. Y., Doubleday, Page & Co., 
1910. 

The Gift of the Wise Men. N. Y., Doubleday, Page & 
Co., 1910. (First Separate Edition.) 

Sixes and Sevens. N. Y., Doubleday, Page & Co., 1911. 

Rolling Stones. N. Y., Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912. 



[32] 




O. HENRY ON VACATION IN WESTEK> 



RALEIGH 

Mutual Publishing Company, Printers 

1914 



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